The America’s Cup races have yet to be held on fresh water. Even when Team Alinghi, from landlocked Switzerland, defended the Cup in 2007, it chose to hold the competition in Spain, on the Mediterranean Sea off Valencia.

But the America’s Cup preliminaries will break the freshwater taboo when Chicago stages a Louis Vuitton World Series event on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

The racing, which will take place on Lake Michigan off Navy Pier, brings together the six teams entered in next year’s main event in Bermuda. They will compete in AC 45 foiling catamarans, a one-design version of the slightly larger boats that will be deployed for the Cup itself in 2017.

Monohulls, long used in the venerable regatta that began in 1851, are generally faster in salt water, because it is more buoyant and therefore creates less displacement.

“There’s less hull to pull through the water, because the boat is floating a little bit higher,” said Tod Reynolds, the event director for the Chicago World Series event.

But foiling catamarans mostly sail above the surface of the water, with submerged carbon-fiber appendages providing the lift and requisite stability.

“With the foiling you’re not so much worried about the displacement as viscosity, so it’s actually the drag over the foils that matters, and fresh water has less drag than salt water over the foils,” Reynolds said. “So if we get a good wind direction and a good windy day in Chicago, I think there’s a good chance we’ll see speed records set in these boats.”

The competitors themselves are not so clear on the repercussions. Matt Cassidy was based in Chicago for several years before joining the crew of the America’s Cup defender, Oracle Team USA, in 2015. He has raced often on Lake Michigan.

“I honestly don’t think it’s going to be that big of a change between salt and fresh water,” Cassidy said by telephone from Bermuda last week. “I keep telling everyone the biggest thing is you’re not going to have to spray all the salt off the boat at the end of the day and wash everything down. Our takeoff speeds might be a little faster, but I honestly don’t think it’s going to be a huge change for us.”

Two things the teams won’t have to worry about on Lake Michigan are ocean tides and river currents. They raced in a world series event in New York last month in the brackish water of the Hudson River off lower Manhattan. They had trouble with the current and with the wind consistency because of the effects created by the tall buildings along both banks.

Chicago has an imposing skyline, too, but only on one side of the course, and the skyscrapers are farther from the water.

“That actually goes back to the Chicago fire,” Reynolds said, referring to the 1871 fire. “The entire lakefront of Chicago is public land, so it’s all parks. What that means is that the racecourse is about a mile away from the first building, so we will still have time for the breeze to kind of reconnect as it comes through the city. But the reality is we are in a city, so if the breeze does come right through the city, it’s going to be shifty.”

“But though we have never run races in flying multihulls, we’ve run a lot in multihulls in this venue,” he added, “and while it is really shifty, it’s not quite as random because the current adds a massive impact where as soon as you lose breeze a little bit, the boat almost stops. Whereas the flat water and the lack of current on the lake allows you to kind of coast a little bit farther and connect the puffs a bit easier.”

That should come as a relief to Ben Ainslie, the star British sailor who wrote a piece in The Daily Telegraph in Britain after the New York event praising the crowd turnout but stating that the race itself was held in “the last place on earth you would want to put a race course.”

Russell Coutts, the former star skipper who is now chief executive of the America’s Cup Event Authority, said in a telephone interview that he was confident that if the races returned to New York, the authorities would allow them to use a more propitious spot in the harbor.

But he also pointed out in response to Ainslie’s newspaper commentary that the same teams that have been leading the way — Emirates Team New Zealand and Oracle Team USA — were still on top, even in fluky conditions. “Ben was obviously disappointed about his result,” Coutts said. “But look at the results, and look at the results of the season.”

This could have been Chicago’s Olympic year. It bid for the 2016 Summer Games that were instead awarded to Rio de Janeiro. Knowing what the International Olympic Committee members know now about Rio’s and Brazil’s political and socioeconomic difficulties, the members might have voted differently.

But Reynolds said he and others in Chicago still hoped that the city would some day lure the America’s Cup itself. Chicago has a significant sailing culture, and the Chicago Yacht Club even backed skipper Buddy Melges and the Heart of America challenge for the America’s Cup in 1987 in Fremantle, Australia. As part of that challenge, lawyers somehow successfully argued to the New York Supreme Court that Lake Michigan was “an arm of the sea” because of its link to the St. Lawrence Seaway and thus satisfied the requirements in the deed of gift to potentially host the America’s Cup.

The city also made a serious bid to host the 2017 edition of the Cup. It went instead to Bermuda, which offered a more attractive financial package and space for team bases in the two years leading into the Cup.

“Our goal is that this world-series event would be a steppingstone to the finals should the stars align, and obviously a lot of stars have to align,” Reynolds said. “I mean, how perfect would it be to have the teams be able to use the existing infrastructure in Bermuda, be based there, train there just as they are doing now, and then have the finals in a city where it’s easy for fans to get to, sponsors are able to activate, and you have our signature skyline in the background.”